The live broadcast via an internet chat site of a 24-year-old woman hanging herself has sparked fresh concern over the harm webcam-based sites can have on Thai youths.

Nichakorn Srisawat, of Nakhon Sawan, was found hanging by a bedsheet tied to a ceiling fan in her room at an apartment in Bangkok’s Bang Khen district on Sunday.

She committed suicide in front of a webcam broadcasting over the internet site Camfrog to allow others, including her estranged boyfriend, to witness her death.

The woman’s messages posted on Camfrog’s “ghost radio” chatroom lamenting her failed relationship has led police to believe she decided to end her life after her boyfriend broke up with her.

The tragedy has triggered a fresh round of criticisms over the inappropriate use of the webcam-based programme.

Camfrog made headlines a few years ago when it was found youngsters stripped in front of the webcam or used the site for sex chats with strangers.

A relative of Nichakorn yesterday warned users of online chat services to exercise caution.

“[Online chatting services] have both good and bad sides. One should use them cautiously,” said the relative, who declined to be named. She said Nichakorn was a cheerful woman who had shown no signs of stress or depression.

The director of the Mental Health Department’s Rajanukul Institute, Dr Panpimol Wiputakorn, urged police dealing with computer crime to make sure no footage of the suicide was disseminated online to prevent “copycat” behaviour.

Dr Panpimol also urged parents to pay more attention to their children, especially those who use webcam chat services regularly.

The “ghost radio” chatroom where Nichakorn broadcast her suicide was shut down yesterday, but some internet users reported they spotted the woman’s suicide clip on the internet.

The mental health expert said she did not think Nichakorn had a mental problem. She just wanted to share her agony with her peers in the chatroom.

The suicide rate in Thailand stands at 6.5 per 100,000 people. That is not high compared with other countries such as Japan and members of the European Union where the rate is almost 20:100,000.

Supinya Klangnarong, a member of the internet-user group Thai Netizen Network, said the tragedy should be a wake-up call for society to seriously promote internet literacy to prevent destructive use of the service.

“It is very important to create strong safeguards for internet users through cooperation from all sectors in society to protect internet users from the negative impact of online social networks,” she said.

Related Articles

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• Searching for the off switch (mindhacks.com)
• Police: Man kills himself during live Internet broadcast (cnn.com)
• Internet Helps, But Also Hurts, Suicide Prevention Efforts (livescience.com)
• How the internet helps people to commit suicide (blogs.telegraph.co.uk)

By Mary Robinson and Desmond Tutu
Sunday, December 5, 2010;

Dhaki is from the southern region of Ethiopia. At age 13, instead of going to school, Dhaki was marrried and tended cattle for her family. Her husband, 11 years older than she, regularly forced himself on her. Her nightly cries were ignored by her neighbors, and she was shunned by her community for not respecting the wishes of her husband.

Sadly, millions of girls worldwide have little or no choice about when and whom they marry. One in three girls in the developing world is married before she is 18 – one in seven before she is 15. The reasons for child marriage vary: Custom, poverty and lack of education all play a part. Boys are married young, too, but a far greater number of girls are affected and it has a much more devastating impact on their lives.

Because they are young, child brides are relatively powerless in their families and often lack access to health information. This makes them more vulnerable to serious injury and death in childbirth – the leading cause of death in girls in the developing world ages 15 to 19. Child brides are also more likely to experience domestic violence and to live in poverty than women who marry later.

Child marriage is just one factor in the lives of many girls and women, but it affects not just their health, education and employment options but also the welfare of their communities. We know that empowering girls is one of the most effective ways to improve the health and prosperity of societies. Child marriage perpetuates poverty by keeping girls, their children and their communities poor.

To realize change, we first need to provide greater options for girls by investing in them and supporting their families. Changing national laws is not enough. Most countries with high rates of child marriage have outlawed it. Lasting change requires local leaders and communities to agree that child marriage is harmful and make a collective decision to end the practice.

Innovative grass-roots programs to end child marriage already exist. From Cameroon to India, communities, humanitarian aid organizations and women’s rights groups are pioneering efforts to encourage investment in girls and discourage child marriage. As a starting point, they are fostering community conversations about the health risks for very young mothers and the benefits of education. Over time, communities are beginning to question traditional practices and ask what can be done to improve the lives of their daughters.

This change, however, is taking place on a small scale, very slowly. We can all play our part in encouraging change on a larger scale. The United States is stepping up: The International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act, legislation that has bipartisan support, was passed unanimously by the Senate last week. This act illustrates how support for securing a just and healthy life for every woman and girl transcends politics.

As members of an independent group of leaders who were asked by Nelson Mandela to use our influence to address major causes of human suffering, we have never been involved in supporting a specific piece of legislation before, but we believe that investing in efforts to prevent child marriage is critical to global development and the achievement of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. We applaud the Senate for passing this forward-looking legislation and urge the House of Representatives to follow suit.

We know that these efforts can have real impact. We are pleased to report that Dhaki received support from a local development program that enabled her to leave her husband and continue her education. She now teaches others about the risks of early marriage and the benefits of going to school. The United States has the opportunity to help millions of girls like Dhaki realize a different future for themselves and their daughters, and in the process, transform entire communities worldwide.

Mary Robinson is a former president of Ireland. Desmond Tutu, the recipient of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, is archbishop emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa. Both are members of The Elders, a group of global leaders focusing on conflict and humanitarian issues.

Related Articles

• Movement Against Child Marriages Picks Up Steam in Saudi Arabia (humanrights.change.org)
• Child marriage: our commitment to ending it | Jimmy Carter | Fernando Henrique Cardoso (guardian.co.uk)
• Tell Congress to Stop Child Marriage Around the World (humantrafficking.change.org)
• Vote on Child Marriage in Yemen Delayed Indefinitely (humantrafficking.change.org)
• More education means more faith in marriage, new report says (cnn.com)

By Ylan Q. Mui
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 22, 2010; 12:59 AM

The Federal Trade Commission is seeking to revise the protocol surrounding two of life’s touchiest subjects: debt and death.

Debt collection has become an increasingly controversial practice as more Americans default on loan payments. Government data show the charge-off rate on consumer loans spiked to 6.71 percent during the second quarter – the highest level in at least 25 years. (Five years ago, the charge-off rate – loans written off by their lenders as uncollectable – was 2.4 percent.) Meanwhile, debt collection ranked second on the FTC‘s list of most common consumer complaints last year after not even cracking the top 20 two years ago.

The rise in debt collection has spawned a niche market devoted to recouping money from those who die with unpaid bills. The FTC began investigating the practice several months ago and found confusion among collectors over whom they were allowed to contact and what they could say, said Joel Winston, the agency’s associate director of financial practices.

“The debt doesn’t disappear when the person dies,” he said. “It’s still a valid debt, and the collector can still collect it.”

But the question is: From whom?

The federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act limits the people that collectors can contact to those with authority to pay the debt – typically a spouse or family member, and possibly a third-party executor of an estate. But in a proposed policy statement, the FTC said changes to court procedures have widened the pool of those who may be able to pay to include a host of other legal representatives.

Some consumer activists have criticized the FTC proposal as giving too much leeway to debt collectors. In addition, they have questioned details such as use of the word “spouse” vs. “widow” or “widower,” arguing that marriages end upon death. Just whom debt collectors can contact is a particularly sensitive issue because the calls often come during what can be a time of high stress for friends and family of the deceased.

“Presumably we’re dealing with elderly people at the most vulnerable time that you could imagine,” said Richard Rubin, a consumer rights lawyer in Santa Fe, N.M.

Locating those who can pay the debt creates another challenge. Often, collectors may contact several friends or relatives in their attempt to find the right person. Current law allows collectors to only ask for “location information” without revealing that a debt is owed. The FTC is considering relaxing that rule for those who are deceased.

But that could pave the way for collectors to persuade unobligated consumers to pay the debt, consumer groups say. In its investigation of the practice, the FTC listened to thousands of phone calls and found debt collectors often operating in a gray area, Winston said.

“Without actually saying anything inaccurate, a collector can kind of maneuver the consumer into paying something they didn’t have to pay,” he said.

The FTC proposal states that collectors appealing to consumers’ “moral obligation” to close the debt could violate federal law. In addition, it emphasized that collectors cannot imply that those with authority to pay the debt must do so out of their own pockets. All debts should be paid out of the deceased’s estate.

“We are determined to ensure that the collectors play by the rules,” Winston said.

But consumer groups said the language used in the FTC’s proposal is too loose and could have the opposite of the intended effect.

“The FTC should strengthen protections for grieving families and friends, not open the door to debt collection efforts that often aim to exploit the vulnerability of the bereaved,” Robert J. Hobbs, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center, said in a statement.

The FTC has extended the public comment period 0n the proposal to Dec. 1.

Those wishing to comment can go to ftcpublic.commentworks.com/ftc/deceaseddebtcollection.

Related Articles

• You: FTC proposes new guidelines for collecting debt from dead people (washingtonpost.com)
• FTC Takes On Debt Collectors (online.wsj.com)
• Jennifer Waters’s Consumer Confidential: FTC takes on debt collectors (marketwatch.com)
• FTC May Allow Debt Collectors To Target Families of Deceased (smarterotti.com)
• FTC May Weaken Protections, Allow Debt Collectors to Target Families, Friends, Neighbors of Consumers Who Have Died (prnewswire.com)

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 21, 2010; 8:23 PM

CROOM, MD. – The winding Mataponi Creek looks clear in the sunlight, with marsh grasses lining its banks. But some of the coal ash waste from a nearby power plant is also coursing through its waters, and residents are worried it is contaminating their well water.

The area around the Brandywine ash storage site – where waste from Mirant Mid-Atlantic’s Chalk Point plant containing carcinogens and heavy metals ends up – is a fairly rural community, with residents who are far from politically active and have little leverage with elected officials who might act on the matter.

“Why is this not in some other county? Why is it not in the Potomac?” asked Fred Tutman, who heads the environmental advocacy group Patuxent Riverkeeper, as he navigated his motorboat on the Mataponi Creek. “It’s about power, economic power, political power, resource power.”

The controversy over toxic coal ash waste in this corner of Prince George’s County – and fights for greater coal ash regulation from Alabama to Puerto Rico – highlights an issue that has been around for decades and is again in the spotlight: environmental justice.

Obama administration officials are looking at hazardous waste storage, toxic air emissions and an array of other contaminants to try to determine whether low-income and minority communities are disproportionately exposed to them.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, has made the issue one of her top policy priorities, alarming manufacturing and business interests.

“I really think of this as the biggest chunk of unfinished business when you think about the environmental landscape,” Jackson said in an interview.

Maryland’s Department of the Environment filed a lawsuit in January against Mirant over its discharges from coal combustion, which include pollutants such as arsenic and lead. For years utilities have had considerable leeway in how they handle this concentrated waste, but state officials allege that Mirant’s storage site is discharging pollutants into groundwater without a permit.

In a written statement, Mirant spokeswoman Misty Allen said the company “does not comment on litigation matters. Mirant believes it has and continues to operate the Brandywine Fly Ash facility, purchased by the company in 2000, in accordance with all state and federal law and permits.” She added that Chalk Point, the state’s largest power plant, employs more than 250 workers and boasts an annual payroll of more than $30 million.

But 45 untested private wells are within a half-mile of the landfill, with a state wildlife refuge also nearby.

“Communities have a right to know whether the polluting facilities in their neighborhood are complying with the law,” said Environmental Integrity Project staff attorney Jennifer Peterson, whose group is a party to the lawsuit.

In addition to looking at coal ash storage, EPA officials are reevaluating how the government defines solid waste and measures short-term exposure to smog-forming pollutants. They have forced a variety of emitters, including container-glass plants, cement plants and oil refineries, to install pollution controls in poor areas struggling with bad air quality.

“The intensity and focus on this issue in this administration, the integration of it into the bowels of the agency, has been so aggressive, those of us who do this work cannot keep up with what the administration is doing,” said Vernice Miller-Travis, vice chair of the Maryland Commission on Environmental Justice and Sustainable Communities.

Among the EPA’s moves: reviving an interagency environmental justice task force that had been dormant for a dozen years; issuing a formal guidance to regional offices instructing them to seek the input of disadvantaged groups when making decisions; and drafting a plan to integrate the concept of environmental justice into the agency’s everyday decision-making.

This flurry of activity worries industry officials such as Keith McCoy, vice president for energy and resources policy at the National Association of Manufacturers, who warned that it could hurt business operations across the country.

“Basically, EPA is saying to regional offices, engage with the environmental justice community and don’t meet with anyone else on the issue,” McCoy said, referring the draft guidance. “They’ve turned this more into a confrontational issue.”

Jackson calls those kinds of objections “nonsense,” saying her agency is simply reaching out to neglected communities that remain “hot spots of emissions, hot spots of contamination.” People living in those neighborhoods, she said, don’t want to lower their living standards in exchange for work.

“Find me the person who says, ‘I’ll take the pollution if you give me the job,’ ” she said.

But for years, certain urban and rural areas have served as magnets for industrial facilities and waste sites, sometimes because they generate economic opportunities. Chemical plants, an incinerator, a power plant and other facilities in three Baltimore neighborhoods – Brooklyn, Curtis Bay and Hawkins Point – released more than 20.4 million pounds of hazardous air pollutants in 2008 alone, and there are now plans underway to locate both a waste-to-energy incinerator and an ash landfill in the area.

Andy Galli, Maryland program coordinator for Clean Water Action, said one of the problems with the current permitting process for those facilities is that “there’s nothing that requires cumulative effects on these communities.”

People began talking about the issue of environmental justice four decades ago. During the first Earth Day in 1970, Chicano activist Arturo Sandoval led a march from an Albuquerque park to the city’s barrio, where protesters waved signs with messages such as “Keep Your Pollution, Give Us Life.”

The term entered the national lexicon in 1987 when the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice published a report on the issue, sparked by North Carolina’s decision to place a toxic waste facility in a poor, predominantly African American community in Warren County.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, activists like Robert D. Bullard, who directs the Environmental Justice Resource Center in Atlanta, are still scheduling meetings with EPA regional officials, for example, to question the deposit of waste from the BP oil spill in the majority-black town of Campbellton, Fla., and the shipment of toxic coal ash from the 2008 Tennessee Valley Authority spill in mostly-white Roane County, Tenn., to a site in mostly-black Perry County, Ala.

“We’re not just talking about something that happened 30 years ago, legacy stuff,” said Bullard, who attributes those decisions to regional EPA officials rather than headquarters staff.

Bullard and others are pressing EPA to adopt a more stringent rule regarding the handling of coal ash: Right now the agency is deciding whether to require federal oversight of its transport and disposal, or to establish guidelines that the states could choose whether to enforce. Industry advocates argue that stricter rules will drive up costs and make it more difficult to reuse the coal combustion waste.

The issue is a source of contention as far away as Puerto Rico, where a subsidiary of the Virginia-based energy giant AES built a coal-fired plant in 2002 without establishing a landfill. For a few years the company shipped the waste to the Dominican Republic, but when that nation sued over the environmental impact and refused to accept any more, AES – which declined comment – started selling it as cheap landfill in Puerto Rico.

Now housing developments such as Parque Gabriela II in Salinas, one of the island’s poorest regions, have piles of coal ash elevating their homes above the flood plain and lining a storm water retention pond whose contents could end up in the city’s sole source of drinking water.

“All of this is getting leached into the aquifer,” said Osvaldo Rosario, an environmental chemistry professor at the University of Puerto Rico’s Rio Piedras campus. Rosario has sampled ash from the site, and an analysis showed radioactive material at more than twice the recommended limit under EPA guidelines.

Ruth Santiago, a lawyer representing several environmental groups in Puerto Rico, has appealed to EPA to step in and control the coal waste’s disposal. “We’ve been asking for many years for attention to this issue,” she said. The agency’s proposed rules are “a step in the right direction. . . . As it is now, they can call it beneficial use, and have anybody dump it anywhere.”

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A total of 348 corpses, wrapped in plastic bags and newspaper, were found by a member of the temple staff in a mortuary storage area.

Police Colonel Metee Rakphan said plastic bags were found “with foetal corpses inside hidden in the storehouse of a temple”.

“We assume that they were from illegal abortion clinics, and we are now investigating,” he said, adding that they were questioning the temple mortician.

One rescue worker with the Poh Teck Tung foundation, a charity that provides emergency rescue and body recovery services, said up to 500 foetuses could eventually be uncovered.

Buddhist temples in Thailand not only perform cremation ceremonies, but also store bodies in specially refrigerated areas.

Abortion is illegal in Thailand except when it is judged that delivery would harm the mother or when the pregnancy is the result of rape.

A Singapore court jailed a 75-year-old British author for six weeks on Tuesday for publishing a book critical of executions in the city-state.

Alan Shadrake, a 75-year-old British author, has been jailed for six weeks and fined 20,000 Singapore dollars (15,000 US) for publishing a book critical of executions in Singapore.

Alan Shadrake was handed the prison sentence and a fine of 20,000 Singapore dollars (15,000 US) for contempt of court over the book, which features an interview with a former chief executioner.

High Court Judge Quentin Loh dismissed a last-minute apology by Shadrake as “nothing more than a tactical ploy in court to obtain a reduced sentence” and ruled that the freelance journalist will have to serve two extra weeks in prison if he fails to pay the fine.

“A fine should be imposed to prevent Mr Shadrake from profiting from his contempt (of court),” the judge said.

The ruling said the sentence was the stiffest ever imposed for contempt of court in Singapore. The previous longest jail term was 15 days.

Shadrake, who lives in Malaysia and Britain, was arrested by Singapore police in July after launching the book, “Once a Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice in the Dock”.

It includes a profile of Darshan Singh, the former chief executioner at Singapore’s Changi Prison who, according to the author, executed around 1,000 men and women from 1959 until he retired in 2006.

It also features interviews with human rights activists, lawyers and former police officers on cases involving capital punishment.

In a November 3 ruling that found Shadrake guilty, the judge said, “Mr Shadrake’s technique is to make or insinuate his claims against a dissembling and selective background of truths and half-truths, and sometimes outright falsehoods.

“A casual and unwary reader, who does not subject the book to detailed scrutiny, might well believe his claims… and in so doing would have lost confidence in the administration of justice in Singapore.”

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• Alan Shadrake faces Singapore jail term for criticising use of death penalty | World news | The Guardian (jeffpruett.wordpress.com)
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Like the wizard telling the people of Oz to “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” Karl Rove used media appearances at the close of the 2010 midterm campaign to dismiss President Obama’s complaints that Republican consultants, led by the former White House political czar, were distorting Senate and House races across the country with a flood of money—hundreds of millions of dollars—from multinational corporations and billionaire conservatives into Senate and House races. “Obama looks weirdly disconnected—and slightly obsessive—when he talks so much about the Chamber of Commerce, Ed Gillespie and me,” Rove mused. “The president has already wasted one-quarter of the campaign’s final four weeks on this sideshow.”

The “sideshow” from which Rove sought to distract attention was, in fact, the most important story of the most expensive midterm election in American history: the radical transformation of our politics by a money-and-media election complex that is now more definitional than any candidate or party—and that poses every bit as much of a threat to democracy as the military-industrial complex about which Dwight Eisenhower warned us a half-century ago. This is not the next chapter in the old money-and-politics debate. This is the redefinition of politics by a pair of new and equally important factors—the freeing of corporations to spend any amount on electioneering and the collapse of substantive print and broadcast reporting on campaigns. In combination they have created a “new normal,” in which consultants dealing in dollar amounts unprecedented in American history use “independent” expenditures to tip the balance of elections in favor of their clients. Unchecked by even rudimentary campaign finance regulation, unchallenged by a journalism sufficient to identify and expose abuses of the electoral process and abetted by commercial broadcasters that this year pocketed $3 billion in political ad revenues, the money-and-media election complex was a nearly unbeatable force in 2010.

Of fifty-three competitive House districts where Rove and his compatriots backed Republicans with “independent” expenditures that exceeded those made on behalf of Democrats—often by more than $1 million per district, according to Public Citizen—the Republicans won fifty-one. Roughly three-quarters of all GOP House gains came in districts where independent expenditures by groups like the Chamber of Commerce and Rove’s American Crossroads gave Republican candidates, some of them virtual unknowns until the outside money flowed in, the advantage. The money is powerful, of course, but that power is supercharged because of the decay, and in many cases disappearance, of independent and skeptical journalism at the state and regional levels, where elections are decided. Campaign narratives used to be created by reporters who, imperfectly but seriously, pulled together the multiple threads of an election season to give voters perspective. Now that narrative is driven by commercials—millions of them, most negative. The narrative for the most part still comes from broadcast and cable TV stations, as it has for some time, but it is now produced and paid for by economic elites that seek to define not just the results of an election but the scope and character of government itself. To neglect the money-and-media election complex or, worse yet, to imagine that progressive forces can compete within it will make the 2012 election season look like 2010 on steroids. Determined and dramatic responses are the only options if we hope to maintain anything more than the remnants of a functioning democracy.

The immediate cause of the crisis was the Supreme Court’s January 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, which wiped away a century of campaign finance regulations designed to prevent corporations and business alliances from using their immense resources to buy the results that best serve their interests. There was bipartisan shock at the ruling, with protest across the spectrum. National Voting Rights Institute founder John Bonifaz declared that the freeing of corporations to tap general treasury funds would allow them to spend so freely that they could “effectively own our democracy.”

The critique was right, but even serious analysts tended to underestimate the speed with which corporate interests and wealthy conservatives would take advantage of the severe damage done to campaign finance laws. The corporate intervention was unapologetic. “The big three stepping into the batter’s box are the financial services industry, the energy industry and the health insurance industry,” chirped veteran GOP operative Scott Reed, whose Commission on Hope, Growth and Opportunity spent millions, perhaps tens of millions, this fall on thousands of commercials attacking Democratic lawmakers in battleground states all over the country. Reed’s operation was identified by the Media Matters Action Network as a “small fry” player among the more than sixty nonparty groups that by late October had paid for nearly 150,000 commercials and an untold number of direct-mail attacks in a frenzy of spending that would make the 2010 cycle (price tag: $4 billion and counting) more expensive than either the 2006 midterms or the 2004 presidential race.

To be sure, Democrats tried to play the game and raise corporate money too, but the balance was off from the start; by one measure, that of the Center for Media and Democracy, “spending by outside interest groups [was] up at least 500 percent since the last midterm election, with pro-Republican groups outspending those favoring Democrats by seven-to-one.”

* * *

To some extent, this is a story as old as the nation itself. Founding father John Jay thought “those who own the country ought to govern it.” The battle to establish a credible system of “one person, one vote” instead of “one dollar, one vote” has been a running theme in American history. The stakes have always been the same: the less democratic our elections, the more corrupt our governance. But the current moment sees the country accelerating toward the edge of a cliff. “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both,” observed Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. America is being put to the Brandeis test: democracy or plutocracy. The money-and-media election complex is creating a radically different electoral landscape than anything Americans have known since the Gilded Age. That landscape is characterized, pundits tell us, by an “enthusiasm gap.” No kidding. Americans are not stupid. They knew their relatively paltry contributions, and even their votes, were unlikely to stop a $4 billion onslaught. To those bankrolling the system, voter cynicism and apathy are welcome. The more that the 2008 surge of youth participation in electoral politics dissipates, the better for them. Their interests are best served by narrowing the range of debate and participation, since that makes it easier to buy the government. As much as commentators like Jon Meacham might want to believe that “we are now living with a political class which has a financial and cultural interest in conflict rather than in governing,” the hard truth is that we have a corporate class that funds electoral conflict for the purpose of forging a political class that will govern in its interest.

The emerging money-and-media election complex is perfectly designed to make participants conform or suffer the consequences. It should come as no surprise that some of the most troubling results of 2010 involved the defeats of independent players of both parties who had battled hardest for clean politics and ethical government—Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, the leading progressive Democratic reformer, was defeated, as was Representative Mike Castle, a moderate Republican beaten in Delaware’s GOP Senate primary by Tea Party heroine Christine O’Donnell. Nor should it get better in 2012. “It’s a bigger prize in 2012, and that’s changing the White House,” says Robert Duncan, chair of American Crossroads. “We’ve planted the flag for permanence, and we believe we will play a major role for 2012.”

* * *

But it’s not just corporations and consultants who are setting the new agenda. The most important yet least-recognized piece of the money-and-media election complex is the commercial broadcasting industry, which just had its best money-making election season ever. Political advertising has become an enormous cash cow for it—roughly two-thirds of the campaign spending this year flowed into the coffers of TV stations; the final figure is likely to be well above $2 billion. Whereas in the 1990s the average commercial TV station received about 3 percent of its revenues from campaign ads, this year campaign money could account for as much as 20 percent. And station owners are not missing a beat; thirty-second spots that went for $2,000 in 2008 were jacked up to $5,000 this year, according to the Los Angeles Times. Much of this money will go to stations owned by a handful of Fortune 500 firms. No wonder station owners oppose campaign finance reform; their lobby role in Washington is similar to the NRA’s in battling bans on assault weapons.

Yet commercial broadcasters receive monopoly licenses for their scarce channels at no charge from the government under the condition that they serve the public interest. By any account, the most important role of our media is to make the electoral system serve the voters, who, as surveys continue to demonstrate, rely on local TV as their main source for news. However, local TV covers far less than it did two or three decades ago; according to the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, a thirty-minute newscast at election time has more political advertising than campaign news. Even when politics does get covered, the focus, increasingly, is on “analyzing” ads. And the cumulative effect of endless advertising overwhelms what little remains of independent on-air coverage. What incentive do commercial stations have to cover politics when they can force candidates and players to pay for it? Nice work if you can get it.

This contradiction is magnified by the aforementioned decline of political journalism across all media. If the United States had a vibrant and credible news media, the problem of the money-and-media election complex would be less pressing, as citizens could use news coverage and dismiss much of the brazen deception of ads. Instead, our news media, in decline for decades, is in free fall [see Nichols and McChesney, "The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers [1],” April 6, 2009]. The shuttering of dozens of papers and the wholesale layoff of tens of thousands of journalists and support staffers, the shuttering of Washington and statehouse bureaus and the shift of radio and cable TV from traditional campaign coverage to one-sided talk formats that often reinforce rather than sort through the spin have allowed money to speak more loudly than ever before. New-media initiatives are encouraging, but they have not begun to fill the void, in large part because few have developed business models that can pay for serious independent journalism.

The changes taking place in how campaigns are paid for and covered provides the most meaningful explanation for otherwise incomprehensible shifts in our politics. We know and respect the multitude of theories being advanced for why 2010 went so horribly awry for Democrats and particularly for progressives, but we would argue that the key factor is the emergence of the money-and-media election complex. Recognizing how this system works is necessary if we are to recognize the absurdity of the suggestion—advanced by former Clinton administration aide and veteran Democratic fundraiser Harold Ickes, among others in the consultocracy—that Democrats can somehow buy their way back into the game by getting progressive donors to give as generously as Rove’s billionaires and the wealthiest multinationals. Only an insider with no sense of history could willingly embrace this system. And if Democrats somehow “succeed” in the money-and-media election complex, it will be at the price of the party’s soul and of any prospect that progressive ideas will get a hearing.

Democrats in anything more than name only cannot win the money race. As Michael Vachon, an adviser to George Soros, correctly notes with regard to the consultants who organize “independent” expenditures on behalf of Republicans (and perhaps of corporate-friendly Democrats), “Their resources will always be too great because the funds come from those who are acting in their economic self-interest.” Fundamental reform is going to be necessary. And it will not be easy, as we are talking about changing our entire political process in a way that frightens economic elites. Opposition from entrenched, procorporate Republicans will be intense, as evidence suggests that their corrupt and unpopular policies can prevail at the polls only with the sort of depressed and selective turnout and lack of critical scrutiny that the money-and-media system encourages. How ironic that, just as demographic trends are moving in a decidedly progressive direction—as minorities begin to form majorities in our states, and as young people move increasingly to the left on social and economic issues—the electoral system is becoming a bastion of reaction.

Rove, Reed and their allies—including Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and soon-to-be House Speaker John Boehner—would have us believe that more spending is good and that ads can be educational. This is an extension of the “money is speech” argument that has underpinned a series of Supreme Court rulings, beginning with Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 and culminating in Citizens United, that initially undermined but have by now made a mockery of campaign finance reform. It’s an absurd construct. But it is being reinforced by consultants—veteran Democrats as well as Republicans—and TV executives who are cogs in a permanent campaign apparatus.

The counsel of the self-interested “players” is always the same: raise money, more money and more money still—and don’t do or say anything that makes it harder to raise money. This thinking has bled into what is left of our journalism, such that political reporters today spend more time covering the money that candidates, parties and interest groups raise and spend than examining their records and intentions. Whereas journalists once wrote stories about issues, and candidates cut commercials in response to them, now some journalists go through entire campaigns doing little more than fact-checking commercials. On many days, reviews of ads are all that appear in print and broadcast reports. And what do new-media outlets bring to the table? An opportunity to watch ads on YouTube!

As ads become the primary source of political information, we create a politics based on lies or, at best, decontextualized quarter-truths. Campaign ads are unregulated for truthfulness, unlike commercial advertising. Three decades ago Ogilvy and Mather executive Robert Spero determined that if political ads had to meet the same Federal Trade Commission criteria as commercial ads, all of them would be rejected as fraudulent. The regulation of commercial ads may be more lax today, but we doubt that any study of political ads in 2010 would regard them more favorably than Spero did.

The journalists who want to cut through the lies are having a harder time doing so. One of the truly unsettling developments of this election season was the decision by prominent candidates either to avoid the press, as Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle did, or to refuse opportunities to debate. Once upon a time challengers hungered to debate incumbents; in 2010 incumbents like Florida Representative Alan Grayson found themselves chasing after well-funded challengers. Feingold offered to debate his millionaire opponent in forums across the state, but Republican Ron Johnson, who had no record in public life and who even avoided interviews with newspaper editorial boards, refused. Instead, Johnson let his advertisements and those paid for by the Chamber of Commerce, American Action Network and sundry organizations that flooded the state with anti-Feingold ads do his talking. Even when Johnson did debate in a handful of forums available for broadcast by the state’s TV stations, many stations avoided airing them in prime time. Wisconsin lawyer Ed Garvey, a former Democratic nominee for governor, tried to tune in to a much-anticipated Feingold-Johnson debate, only to find it was not being aired. He called the station and was told he could track it down on a website. “As a citizen, I was left with no option but the ads. I got nothing of substance from television stations,” griped Garvey. “I thought they were supposed to operate in the public interest.”

That should be the starting point of any response to the money-and-media election complex. We have to stop thinking about the crisis of our politics merely in terms of reforming the campaign finance system (though of course it’s important to fight for reforms). It’s a media ownership and responsibility issue as well. It goes to the heart of why freedom of the press is enshrined in our Constitution. And regulatory agencies that are empowered to protect the public interest should be the first to intervene. The Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Election Commission have a duty to figure out exactly how much was spent, by whom and to what end. That examination should start with dollar amounts, but it shouldn’t stop there. It should explore the issue of whether TV stations that made a fortune running campaign ads met even the most basic public-interest requirements of companies that obtain broadcast licenses. How much campaign journalism have these stations been doing, compared with a generation ago? How many debates are they airing in prime time? FCC member Michael Copps understands the crisis and intends to press ahead this fall with demands for stronger public-interest requirements for broadcasters. Copps is no fool; he knows this is the hardest of all fights. That’s why he will need support from Congress as well as citizens.

House and Senate committees should hold hearings about the money-and-media election complex. How about calling Representative Pete DeFazio to testify? The Oregon maverick was one of many Democratic incumbents facing marginal challengers who suddenly found himself battered by attack ads paid for by a shadowy group no one had heard of. DeFazio pushed back, taking a camera crew to the Capitol Hill condo from which the group operated and exposing the source as a single New York–based hedge fund gazillionaire who was apparently angered by the Congressman’s ardent advocacy for holding Wall Street speculators to account. That’s the stuff of a good hearing. But don’t stop with DeFazio; call the hedge fund manager who went after him. Then call Karl Rove. The 111th Congress has been lame when it comes to oversight; it should finish with a bang. And state legislative committees around the country should do the same.

Gathering the data and grilling the guilty players will make the case for fundamental reform, which must come at multiple levels. The FCC could require stations to grant equal advertising time to any candidate who is attacked in an ad paid for by corporations, with the free response ad to immediately follow the hit job. The FCC should consider requiring free TV ads for every candidate on the ballot if any candidate buys his or her own spots. This would allow wealthy candidates access but would prevent them from shouting everyone else down. Let the stations jack up rates to cover all the time, if they want. We suspect the appeal of TV ads will decline if the result is simply to open an equal debate rather than allow one side to dominate. And of course there is the long-overdue matter of providing free airtime to candidates and requiring debates to be broadcast.

Radical ideas? Hardly. Much of what we’re talking about was outlined in the original version of the McCain-Feingold bill of the 1990s and in other proposals advanced over the years. It’s time to renew them. At the same time, we need a public policy commitment to the rejuvenation of news media. A supercharged public and community broadcast system would be a good start. It’s no accident that the corporate right is taking dead aim at public broadcasting, as it remains the one institutional force not under its direct control.

* * *

Ultimately, however, Americans have to get serious about addressing the Citizens United ruling. We have no problem with legislative remedies, especially if they embody proposals like those advanced by the Sunlight Foundation to establish online transparency at every level of influence, from independent expenditures to lobbying to bundled campaign contributions. We agree with Lisa Gilbert of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, who says Representative Grayson has proposed “pieces of good policy” with his Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act, which would impose a 500 percent excise tax on corporate contributions to political committees and on corporate expenditures on political advocacy campaigns; his Corporate Propaganda Sunshine Act, which would require public companies to report what they spend to influence opinion on any matter other than the promotion of their goods and services; and his End Political Kickbacks Act, which would restrict contributions by government contractors. And we have no doubt that Grayson’s advocacy for these reforms helps explain why “independent” groups spent more than $1.2 million on attack ads targeting him.

However, we don’t see any way to avoid the requirement of a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United ruling. Representative Donna Edwards has proposed a sound one, backed by the Free Speech for People campaign. Another approach, proposed by Move to Amend, would begin the process at the state level, where grassroots activists may have more of an opening to demand that legislatures call for an amendment. It’s not necessary to choose a specific strategy at this point, but we do have to recognize that the money-and-media election complex defined the 2010 election, and that its reach is extending to 2012. Taking it on will require boldness, creativity and determination. We will be told it is impossible to beat, but we’re with Lisa Graves, the former Justice Department lawyer who as executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy has become a leader in the fight for a constitutional amendment. She says, “If we don’t seize it as an opportunity because it’s so discouraging, they win.”

Even if only out of self-interest, this is what Obama and his Democratic allies should have been talking about during the 2010 campaign and what they should be shouting about now—not with vague rumblings about contributions from foreign corporations but with shout-it-from-the-rooftops populist rage at a threat to democracy every bit as serious as the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower identified. His charge to Americans with regard to the machinery of military dominance—”We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes”—translates with chilling precision to the new media and money machinery of political dominance.

Scholars of American history have acknowledged for a long time that the United States is far from a true democracy, or even an especially effective representative democracy. Most political decisions are made with precious little input by average citizens. What the government does with wealthy individuals and powerful corporate interests is largely removed from popular control. This is part of the reason voter turnout has for so long been among the lowest in the world. But two things give us confidence in our system. First, we have core civil liberties, especially the right to freedom of speech. And second, we have elections, as flawed as they may be, and that gives the citizenry the periodic capacity to replace whoever is in power with someone else. It is our ultimate and last remaining check.

The money-and-media election complex has transformed longstanding problems into an existential crisis: we are about to lose the democratic promise of elections. It is hard to see how our cherished freedoms can then survive, except to the extent that they are trivial and unthreatening to those in power. What hangs in the balance is democracy itself, along with the promise of the American experiment

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By Ted Koppel
Sunday, November 14, 2010;

To witness Keith Olbermann – the most opinionated among MSNBC’s left-leaning, Fox-baiting, money-generating hosts – suspended even briefly last week for making financial contributions to Democratic political candidates seemed like a whimsical, arcane holdover from a long-gone era of television journalism, when the networks considered the collection and dissemination of substantive and unbiased news to be a public trust.

Back then, a policy against political contributions would have aimed to avoid even the appearance of partisanship. But today, when Olbermann draws more than 1 million like-minded viewers to his program every night precisely because he is avowedly, unabashedly and monotonously partisan, it is not clear what misdemeanor his donations constituted. Consistency?

We live now in a cable news universe that celebrates the opinions of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly – individuals who hold up the twin pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and commentary is highly profitable.

The commercial success of both Fox News and MSNBC is a source of nonpartisan sadness for me. While I can appreciate the financial logic of drowning television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases, the trend is not good for the republic. It is, though, the natural outcome of a growing sense of national entitlement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan‘s oft-quoted observation that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” seems almost quaint in an environment that flaunts opinions as though they were facts.

And so, among the many benefits we have come to believe the founding fathers intended for us, the latest is news we can choose. Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.

It is also part of a pervasive ethos that eschews facts in favor of an idealized reality. The fashion industry has apparently known this for years: Esquire magazine recently found that men’s jeans from a variety of name-brand manufacturers are cut large but labeled small. The actual waist sizes are anywhere from three to six inches roomier than their labels insist.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter that we are being flattered into believing what any full-length mirror can tell us is untrue. But when our accountants, bankers and lawyers, our doctors and our politicians tell us only what we want to hear, despite hard evidence to the contrary, we are headed for disaster. We need only look at our housing industry, our credit card debt, the cost of two wars subsidized by borrowed money, and the rising deficit to understand the dangers of entitlement run rampant. We celebrate truth as a virtue, but only in the abstract. What we really need in our search for truth is a commodity that used to be at the heart of good journalism: facts – along with a willingness to present those facts without fear or favor.

To the degree that broadcast news was a more virtuous operation 40 years ago, it was a function of both fear and innocence. Network executives were afraid that a failure to work in the “public interest, convenience and necessity,” as set forth in the Radio Act of 1927, might cause the Federal Communications Commission to suspend or even revoke their licenses. The three major broadcast networks pointed to their news divisions (which operated at a loss or barely broke even) as evidence that they were fulfilling the FCC’s mandate. News was, in a manner of speaking, the loss leader that permitted NBC, CBS and ABC to justify the enormous profits made by their entertainment divisions.

On the innocence side of the ledger, meanwhile, it never occurred to the network brass that news programming could be profitable.

Until, that is, CBS News unveiled its “60 Minutes” news magazine in 1968. When, after three years or so, “60 Minutes” turned a profit (something no television news program had previously achieved), a light went on, and the news divisions of all three networks came to be seen as profit centers, with all the expectations that entailed.

I recall a Washington meeting many years later at which Michael Eisner, then the chief executive of Disney, ABC’s parent company, took questions from a group of ABC News correspondents and compared our status in the corporate structure to that of the Disney artists who create the company’s world-famous cartoons. (He clearly and sincerely intended the analogy to flatter us.) Even they, Eisner pointed out, were expected to make budget cuts; we would have to do the same.

I mentioned several names to Eisner and asked if he recognized any. He did not. They were, I said, ABC correspondents and cameramen who had been killed or wounded while on assignment. While appreciating the enormous talent of the corporation’s cartoonists, I pointed out that working on a television crew, covering wars, revolutions and natural disasters, was different. The suggestion was not well received.

The parent companies of all three networks would ultimately find a common way of dealing with the risk and expense inherent in operating news bureaus around the world: They would eliminate them. Peter Jennings and I, who joined ABC News within a year of each other in the early 1960s, were profoundly influenced by our years as foreign correspondents. When we became the anchors and managing editors of our respective programs, we tried to make sure foreign news remained a major ingredient. It was a struggle.

Peter called me one afternoon in the mid-’90s to ask whether we at “Nightline” had been receiving the same inquiries that he and his producers were getting at “World News Tonight.” We had, indeed, been getting calls from company bean-counters wanting to know how many times our program had used a given overseas bureau in the preceding year. This data in hand, the accountants constructed the simplest of equations: Divide the cost of running a bureau by the number of television segments it produced. The cost, inevitably, was deemed too high to justify leaving the bureau as it was. Trims led to cuts and, in most cases, to elimination.

The networks say they still maintain bureaus around the world, but whereas in the 1960s I was one of 20 to 30 correspondents working out of fully staffed offices in more than a dozen major capitals, for the most part, a “bureau” now is just a local fixer who speaks English and can facilitate the work of a visiting producer or a correspondent in from London.

Much of the American public used to gather before the electronic hearth every evening, separate but together, while Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Frank Reynolds and Howard K. Smith offered relatively unbiased accounts of information that their respective news organizations believed the public needed to know. The ritual permitted, and perhaps encouraged, shared perceptions and even the possibility of compromise among those who disagreed.

It was an imperfect, untidy little Eden of journalism where reporters were motivated to gather facts about important issues. We didn’t know that we could become profit centers. No one had bitten into that apple yet.

The transition of news from a public service to a profitable commodity is irreversible. Legions of new media present a vista of unrelenting competition. Advertisers crave young viewers, and these young viewers are deemed to be uninterested in hard news, especially hard news from abroad. This is felicitous, since covering overseas news is very expensive. On the other hand, the appetite for strongly held, if unsubstantiated, opinion is demonstrably high. And such talk, as they say, is cheap.

Broadcast news has been outflanked and will soon be overtaken by scores of other media options. The need for clear, objective reporting in a world of rising religious fundamentalism, economic interdependence and global ecological problems is probably greater than it has ever been. But we are no longer a national audience receiving news from a handful of trusted gatekeepers; we’re now a million or more clusters of consumers, harvesting information from like-minded providers.

As you may know, Olbermann returned to his MSNBC program after just two days of enforced absence. (Given cable television’s short attention span, two days may well have seemed like an “indefinite suspension.”) He was gracious about the whole thing, acknowledging at least the historical merit of the rule he had broken: “It’s not a stupid rule,” he said. “It needs to be adapted to the realities of 21st-century journalism.”

There is, after all, not much of a chance that 21st-century journalism will be adapted to conform with the old rules. Technology and the market are offering a tantalizing array of channels, each designed to fill a particular niche – sports, weather, cooking, religion – and an infinite variety of news, prepared and seasoned to reflect our taste, just the way we like it. As someone used to say in a bygone era, “That’s the way it is.”

Ted Koppel, who was managing editor of ABC’s “Nightline” from 1980 to 2005, is a contributing analyst for “BBC World News America.”

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